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Point of clarification: When I refer to Republicans in this article I’m referring to Republican leadership

Yesterday a friend linked an article which talked about the approach that Mitch McConnell is taking for the appointment of cabinet members, where he won’t wait for until ethics reviews are completed before holding confirmation hearings. Unsurprisingly, this isn’t the same standard he held the Democratic party to under Obama, where he specifically wrote a letter outlining the requirements before holding hearings. While he believe that these standards are required for the Democrats he doesn’t believe the Democrats should be able to hold the Republicans to the same set of standards, because they lost the election.

I don’t believe that this is arrogance, or even that “Do as I say not as I do” approach. I believe that this comes down to the basic fact that Republican leadership doesn’t believe that have a legitimate right to ever govern, no matter how many people vote for them. To be fair, I don’t believe that this is only applies to Democrats, I believe that it applies to all other political parties.

If we start with this framework, which really began to be applied in the ’90’s with Clinton in office, we can begin to see a behavior, that successfully, stripped authority from the Democratic party. They continually attacked and continued to come up with new ways to attack the Democratic party and ideas until they were gradually pulled more and more right. They used an approach like OODA loop to continually keep the left on their heels. It worked.

However, they truly felt that they didn’t have the right the govern, which is why the Republicans were in the “right” to do this. Moving forward, we can see continually pressuring the right of predominately Democratic leaning voters. Where many organizations like Think Progress and the ACLU believe that the Republican party successfully suppressed voting.

There is something of a virtuous cycle going on for the Republican party when it comes to sidelining and suppressing votes, the more they suppress votes, the more then can sideline strong blue areas, which allows them to continue suppressing votes. They have been able to do this through the repeal of portions of the voter’s rights act which reduced Judicial oversight of state ‘s that had historically racist voting practices, like much of the south. This combine with Gerrymandering which, as the link shows, can be used to take a predominately Democratic district and string them all together so that even if it was 60% Democrat and there were 5 districts Republicans could still win 60% of the votes. This is happening and has happened in the past. In fact, during 2012, there were definitely cases where more Democrats voted in the house elections, but still lost a more seats than Republicans.

With such a concerted effort to continually win more and more power, the only reason why it’s a MUST do, is that the Republicans do not think that the Democrats have the legitimate right to govern the country. They continually undercut their right to govern, in fact, going so far to curb the authority of the Democrat governing coming into power in NC.

Using this perspective, I believe that this further supports the agenda to impeach Trump. However, this will not stop the Republicans as they definitely seem themselves as the only party with the right to govern. This has to change if the US is going to have an effective government for all the people in the near future.